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An Image Maker Who Gets the Picture

Edward Enninful, the fashion and style director of W Magazine, has become one of the industry’s most influential image makers.Credit
Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

EDWARD ENNINFUL has a thing he likes to say on photo shoots: “I want her to look rich, rich, rich and chic, chic, chic.”

That’s certainly what he went for with Viola Davis in the February issue of W Magazine, where Mr. Enninful is the fashion and style director. At the time, Ms. Davis was up for an Oscar, playing a drab-looking maid in “The Help,” so Mr. Enninful decked her out in sexy Dolce & Gabbana and a diamond necklace from Camilla Dietz Bergeron.

But sometimes he plays against type. Kate Moss, for instance, has had enough tabloid scrapes to rival Paris Hilton, so Mr. Enninful cast her as a nun in a spread shot by Steven Klein. And for the magazine’s November art issue, Mr. Enninful collaborated with Steven Meisel on a series of fake ads that ran throughout the magazine, including one that featured a contestant from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” named Carmen Carrera hawking a fictitious fragrance called La Femme.

It generated considerable attention (“Isn’t W Magazine the cleverest in all the land?” the fashion blog Styleite wrote) and helped to cement Mr. Enninful’s ascent as one of the industry’s most influential image makers. He’s also among the few who is black.

“I like to play with contrast,” said Mr. Enninful, 40. “It’s about changing people’s perceptions of people.”

That’s an editorial luxury granted by his new perch, for which he left Vogue in April of last year. With a circulation of about 450,000 people, W has historically been more of an objet than magazine, making it possible to publish riskier photography. But by 2010, amid a brutal recession and competition from V and Interview, the future was looking bleak.

Condé Nast, which owns W, suddenly replaced its longtime editorial director, Patrick McCarthy, with Stefano Tonchi, who had previously been the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Still, ad pages showed little sign of rebounding.

Mr. Tonchi tapped Mr. Enninful to bring more visual excitement to magazine. “Very often you meet with stylists, they just think in terms of fashion shoots,” Mr. Tonchi said. “Edward thinks about what a magazine as a whole is about.”

In short order, W began showing signs of life. The magazine’s ad pages are up 16.7 percent this year through May, with 453 pages compared to 388 pages for the same period last year, according to Media Industry Newsletter. It was the biggest year-over-year gain among fashion titles.

Many give Mr. Enninful a fair share of the credit. “He is a big part of that success,” Mr. Tonchi said.

“He’s made it much more relevant,” said Ronnie Cooke Newhouse, a prominent advertising executive who has worked with Mr. Enninful on campaigns for Calvin Klein and Lanvin. (Ms. Newhouse is also the wife of Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast International.)

Among other things, Mr. Enninful conceptualized quirky, narrative-driven photography features that played off celebrities’ public personas. In November, the magazine put Nicki Minaj on the cover, dolled up as an 18th-century French courtesan. In April, it took Jessica Biel, the ultimate girl next door, and recreated her as a Raquel-Welch-like bombshell.

“Models are malleable creatures, but it’s a whole other ballgame with celebrities,” said Lynn Hirschberg, the magazine’s editor at large. “Edward brings something out in them that makes them not just people that are interesting for fashion, but more interesting versions of themselves.”

Mr. Enninful’s ability to handle the fragile egos of movie stars and to be edgy without alienating advertisers may have something to do with the time he spent in front of the camera himself.

In the late 1980s, while riding the London subway, the 16-year-old Mr. Enninful was spotted by the British stylist Simon Foxton, who scouted him to be a fashion model. Mr. Enninful’s mother, Grace, a seamstress from Ghana, was horrified at first, but relented. Over the next two years, Mr. Enninful shot editorials with the photographer Nick Knight and did music videos with Neneh Cherry.

But he realized he was never going to be a supermodel. At 18, he got a job as a fashion editor at i-D and became a fixture on London’s night-life scene. “The whole acid house scene was starting,” Mr. Enninful recalled. “We’d go down Portobello market and buy our clothes and customize them and try and outdo the next person.”

By 30, he was styling big campaigns and collaborating with Mr. Meisel at Italian Vogue. “Before that, I was a stylist. With Steven I became an editor,” Mr. Enninful said. “He taught me that fashion photographs could comment on things that were going on.”

One shoot Mr. Enninful and Mr. Meisel did was a spoof of the “They’re Just Like Us,” pages of Us Weekly. Another featured Linda Evangelista decked out in Chanel, her face wrapped in bandages, as if she’d just had plastic surgery.

“Edward understands immediately what the concept of a story is,” said Franca Sozzani, the editor of Italian Vogue. “He’s committed to ideas.”

In 2005, Mr. Enninful got a call from Grace Coddington, asking him to become a contributing editor at American Vogue. Working at Vogue wasn’t always easy. “Did you see ‘The September Issue’? My story was in the bin,” Mr. Enninful said, referring to a scene in the documentary film where Anna Wintour summarily rejects an editorial he had styled.

“I learned that fashion was about more than fancy images,” Mr. Enninful said. “That there was a business side as well.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 17, 2012, on page E6 of the New York edition with the headline: An Image Maker Who Gets the Picture. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe